Vijay Prashad: What you have now is sullenness with most of the world defensive and annoyed with the arrogance of the United States and the other members of the Group of Seven (mainly Britain and France).

Steve Hochstadt: The Republican candidates for President often say that government should be run like a business. Yet businesses take a very different attitude toward the science of global warming than Republican politicians.

Steve Hochstadt: Displaying scientific illiteracy or telling disaster victims that their suffering is God’s punishment won’t create one new job. Scaring Americans about Social Security, the most successful social program in American history, won’t improve economic confidence.

Tina Dupuy: Republicans embrace hot-button social issues as a way to get their disastrous economic policies passed. It’s like Three-Card Monte: while all eyes are on the two grooms – white-collar grand larceny gets decriminalized.

Sharon Kyle: Reducing carbon emissions will not stabilize the climate, going carbon negative for a long time might. As long as we get power from fossil fuel-fired power plants we cannot even hope to have a stable climate.

Wellness

Carole Bartolotto: The problem with concluding that GMOs are safe is that the argument for their safety rests solely on animal studies. These studies are offered as evidence that the debate over GMOs is over. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Environmentalism

Walker Foley: Elected officials seem to think there’s only one side of this property rights argument. The people who live in these communities have rights too, but the oil companies seem to have the jump on [the politicians’] side of the fence.